


Kankri: Don’t Give In

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Kink Meme, Self-Hatred, traumatic coming of age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-04 21:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3091091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kankri is sexually insatiable. That's why he can't give in.</p><p>“You take your vow of celibacy very seriously. You have to, because you may be a mutant, legally not responsible for your actions, a poor, slow child, but you also have your own code of ethics, and one of the big ones is, Thou Shalt Not Kill.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kankri: Don’t Give In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizardlicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardlicks/gifts).



You take your vow of celibacy very seriously. You have to, because you may be a mutant, legally not responsible for your actions, a poor, slow child, but you also have your own code of ethics, and one of the big ones is, _Thou Shalt Not Kill_. (You don’t know why your internal moral compass speaks in Porrim’s ancestor’s quirk, but it is just another sign, that even in your own mind, you are not enough.)

Your first culler was a blue in his prime, and had been permissive and generous. Traecn listened when you spoke. He answered honestly. He paid for all the noncore schoolfeeds you could covet and never once told you that you shouldn’t bother because it would never be of use to a permanent cullee. You had felt safe, and cherished, however problematic it was that he was a citizen, and you a ward that would never ascend to such a status.

Sweeps later, when you had entered the last wild throes of puberty, when you had first been taken with the heat and haze of your mutant libido, he had not dismissed your shamefully wild needs, had not refused your advances, had, over several perigees, taught you what felt good and what felt better, what to watch for in a partner, the dangers of STDs and other such foalishness, the joy of toys.

He had told you that it was flattering that you could look at him, aged and scarred, and still be pulling at the bit to get on with it. He had run his calloused hands over you with appreciation and found all the places that felt oddly good when stroked or scratched, had looked you in the eye. He told you that you were beautiful. You can still feel the ghost of his genuine laughter vibrate through you as you sank onto and into him, equals in this at least.

Foalishly, you had thought that you might have reached some sort of equilibrium, that you could live like this, a beloved pet ward to the end of your days, an equal here, if nowhere outside his hive. You are red-hot, burning up, a meteor, bright but short lived. You had thought, “I can be content to live and die in the tail end of Traecn’s sweeps. It will be good to know that someone will miss me when I die.”

And you had ruined it all when you pailed him to death.

No one blamed you, no one looked at you in your hastily donned robe trimmed in Traecn’s blue and sign, no one pointed and said, “Here is the cause of death! Here is the murderer!”, and somehow that was worse. There was talk about how his heart failure was unexpected, that he died too young, that no one would have thought that he’d ever start a project he couldn’t finish.

You had walked out then, away from and quiet competency of the emergency services and the bustle and gossip of neighbors. You walked out to the bridge Traecn had started and would now never finish, broke the law for the first but not last time in your pathetic mutant life, pushing past the barriers to stand at the edges where steel girders stretched out over the river, naked bones not yet covered in concrete. You had watched the water below, gray and rushing. And you hadn’t jumped.

You had knelt down at the edge, one hand on the bump of your abdomen, one hand already working up your nook. It took a while to coax your seedflap to release, greedy thing that you are, so eagerly taking release after release into you, so reluctant to let go. It shouldn’t have felt good, but you are a mutant, and a murderer, and when you finally spilled the last still warm part of Traecn into the cool river air, you had spilled your own slurry with it, the streak of blue painted over with a red so hideous that the two become a mocking royal purple, the first graffiti on the as-yet-unfinished bridge.

The puddle flows over the edge and drips into the river. In the primitive eras, bridges used to be consecrated to the river gods by a sacrifice. This bridge, child of a sanitized era, will have to make do with the death of her architect and the spill of his murderous feral lover. You could have released in a pail and turned it in, only to watch it be disposed of for containing your contribution. It feels like it is the last decision you make as a person that you choose to dispose of it in your own way.

Afterward, you were assigned to a group home. Afterward, there were no more specialty schoolfeeds. Afterward, you learned to keep it in your pants and you have made your way through each night, from start to finish, gray as the river current, but unhurried. There is nothing to rush to. There is no one who cares. There is no one to notice that you do what you must and no more.

Sometimes you eat like you can fill the emptiness, scour the hive in the wee hours of the day and devour anything you can find, wake at nightfall to the scolding of the sweet green hive culler. Sometimes you go nights without eating, subsist on endless rounds of tea and endless rounds of trips to the hygiene block.

Sometimes you make bargains with yourself. Go this long without feeling the need to put a hand down into the treacherous there, and you can have warm water when you shower. Go this long without eating, and maybe Traecn will forgive you. When you feel desire and you shouldn’t, which is always, to both, you trace your claws over your flanks until they scab, let them heal, start again.

You have systems. And perhaps they’re all nonsense, perhaps you are mad enough that you would have been culled even if you weren’t an anomalous crimson, but you haven’t killed anyone, so you count it as your one win.

But now you’ve been reassigned to your adult culling assignment, been told that the computer analytics have predicted that you’ll do better here. Better how?

They assign you to a violet.

He’s friendly and accommodating, and doesn’t know the meaning of personal space, doesn’t understand that you are a murderer and that even as you hold yourself stiff against his encroachment, you can feel the coolness of his skin already and there’s a squiggle of traitorous desire in your gut, and you want to pail him until he quenches your fire.

You want to lift his shirt slowly, the rasp of cloth against gills soft. You want to lick your gentle way up that ladder and rest your teeth on his earlobe. You want to coax his tongue to twine with yours while you run your claws through his ridiculously gelled hair. You want to slip yourself into his cool wet. You want to nurse his slurry into you until you are finally full, sated, and you know that he would be slow and dazed with the dehydration, that you would have to coax him to drink if he didn’t remember on his own.

You can pace yourself, can come a dozen times in a night or day with ample enough assistance, have felt the stars of dehydration burn at your edges and streak into your pail, only to rise again with the heat of your desire, but you don’t know what is considered normal, don’t know what would be safe for a seadweller, for any troll, before the lost fluid and minerals, the additional stresses, trickle down into their veins, their pusher, and they die of you.

You want to make him laugh while you’re still entangled. And you can’t.

You start a list of reasons why you can’t give in. You write it neatly, on lined paper, tiny cursive precise, and from a distance, it could be anything, a shopping list, a diary entry, a poem. Every time he does something that makes you burn, you go back to your block and re-write the list, now ordered alphabetically, now ordered by importance, now ordered by shame, now ordered by the number of consonants in the adjective that best describes the atrocities you desire.

That he has unreasonably attractive frenemies goes on the list.

You want to pail Aranea until she stops talking. You want to pail knowing Kurloz until he screams through his stitches, and you want to drink the sounds down. You want to pail Meulin softly, tracing shapes onto her back and flanks and legs and ribs while she rides you and hears through your hands how beautiful you think she is.

You want to pail Mituna and Latula together, a sandwich, a pyramid, a rowboat, a wildly tumbling knot, until you come in a threefold bundle of sparks, and you think maybe, maybe, that might be enough, at least for one night. You know you’re not alone in wanting to ride Rufioh and steer with his glorious horns. The difference, of course, is that it would be safe for him to allow another to do so, but you can’t be trusted.

You want to tie Meenah up with her own braids and ride her until she fills you, fills the empty, greedy place inside, and you wring the last drop of privilege from her. You want Porrim to tie you up and take you in hand until you are exhausted, sated, and she is still safe.

Horuss is like a stab in the bloodpusher, because he’s not just the same caste as Traecn, he’s of the same sign and horns. Sometimes you rest your eyes on him, thirsty in a way that has nothing to do with sex, and you pretend that you are still a wriggler safe at hive. Horuss has a cullee, Damara, reassigned from an assignment that didn’t work out, that ended in mysterious circumstances with the culler’s death.

You look at Damara and you know, you know that even as you are the ravening sex beast locked in only on the strength of your vow, she is hiding in the shadow of the troll you see, a wriggler snarling at the world from the makeshift safety of her aggressive advances.

You want sex. You can picture almost every troll you meet, some that you fervently, platonically hate, you can picture how they look in the throes of passion. Your blood is a poison. You are a disease. Damara is aggressive because someone took what they should have asked for, and you feel guiltier now because if Damara had been Traecn’s cullee, she would have been protected, and you, well, you can’t rape the willing, right? Surely that would have sufficed to mitigate any damage?

You don’t need, don’t deserve a flush lover, but you desperately need a diamond, because you think that Cronus is flirting, and you are about to give in.


End file.
